


Gelid Ascent

by Helsabot



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Fever Dreams, First Time, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Games, Porn With Plot, Slow Burn, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 04:20:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1805089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helsabot/pseuds/Helsabot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will loses himself in the game he is playing with Hannibal.</p><p>Set during season 2 sometime after "Naka-Choko". So, spoilers obviously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude

 

_prelude_

 

 

This isn’t the first time Will’s had some whiskey before their sessions, but it’s certainly the first time he’s driven drunk to make one on time.

Everything’s through the lens of a director who thinks handheld camera is more dramatic. And it is. Maybe. When Hannibal opens the door, Will is certain from the first crinkle of the doctor’s eyes that he knows.

They sit like it’s any other night. Hannibal’s hands clasped and Will’s gripping the chair like it’ll take off at any second. Hannibal’s the first one to speak. Hannibal usually is.

“You seem distracted.”

Will’s jaw works. “I am… detached.”

“From what?”

It’s asked simply, but the tilt of Hannibal’s head says more.

Will smiles. “I’m finding it easier and easier to…” He shrugs. “Care less.”

“Is that why you drove here under the influence?”

Will’s chin falls to his chest. He grins. _There_ it is.

He simply shrugs again.

“Will, I must admit I am not comfortable with this.”

Will’s head swivels to meet his gaze. Lazy as a cheap office chair. His brows knit, slightly amused. His grin changes form.

“Where does it stop?”

“Where does what stop?”

“I’ve _killed_ , Doctor Lecter,” he says evenly. “For _you_ ,” he adds, hoping for at least a flinch from the man sat across from him. He doesn’t get one. “And here you are taking the moral high ground at the threat of a D.U.I.”

Hannibal breathes deeply and deflates. But not like he’s lost anything. Will wonders how he does that. “A revoked license and an outrageous fine are not what worry me, Will. The worst crimes can sometimes be those we commit upon ourselves. I don’t want you endangering yourself.”

“I’m not _endangering_ myself.”

Hannibal’s head tilts forward sternly. “What do you believe you are doing, then?”

“I’m… coping.”

Hannibal sighs again, tongue darting out to touch his lip, and this time it’s slightly frustrated. He shifts in his chair and repositions the elegance of his legs.

“You’re being self-destructive. You will not do this again. Do you understand?”

Will’s smile is goofy and muted. “Is that an order, doctor?”

Hannibal stands and swiftly closes the space between them. He reaches out, open palm a demand. “Give me your keys.”

How quickly Will surrenders them is all part of the game. That’s what Will half-believes.

Hannibal locks the keys into a drawer and busies himself with a tray of clinking crystal. He pours too much amber into a tumbler and folds Will’s hands around it. Will is confused, and it is written everywhere on his face.

“Let me tell you a story, Will.”

 

_Long, long ago, when the world was still new…_

 

 

 

 

 


	2. On Candystripe Legs

_three weeks earlier_

 

The way Freddie rubs her thumb into the long, red scratch on her palm seems theatrical. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, and for that he shouldn’t be feeling this very particular distain that is brewing somewhere just north of his stomach. But it’s there.

He hands her a rag—it’s clean, but he can understand the glare in her eyes—it’s been sitting next to a gut hook knife for god knows how long. She takes it anyway and presses it into the barely-blood of the cut.

“You know it’s him.”

“Do I?” she meets his eyes for the first time since he dragged her from her car and back into the barn.

Will shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not… You’ll take a story either way.”

Freddie’s brows knit long enough to spark the annoyance back into Will’s chest. Then she nods to the strung-up suit. 

“What is that?” 

Will has the words. Has rehearsed them in his head to tell himself when he is lying wide-awake at three am:

“It’s necessary.”

Freddie raises one of those infuriating eyebrows. “You killed Randall Tier.”

“As a means to an end.”

“A necessary evil.”

Will grimaces. The contortion tries to find a smile. “ _Tier_ was evil. Hannibal is— I’m _not_ …. I’m doing what is… what is just.”

“You mutilated him.”

The corner of Will’s mouth twitches. “I had to. He’d—he’d suspect. I had to show him that I could. That I… I had to give him—”

“It wasn’t enough to kill the mouse. You had to drop it at his feet. Wrapped in a bow.”

Will’s smile is nearly genuine this time. It’s the sadness that does it.

Freddie shakes her head, curls bouncing and flowing as if down a trellis from the snug of her hat:

“So what medium might _I_ be?”

 

\--

 

Jack wishes he could tell Bella anything. She’d be glad, probably—that her savior truly is the devil she struck back at the hospital. But it’s difficult enough for her to eat the toast he butters for her these days. If breakfast is difficult, he can’t imagine what the full scope and truth of his own life these past few weeks might do to her.

He’s having a hard enough time juggling the truth along with the leaden lies.

“ _Bella,_ ” he whispers against her ear. And the drugs that keep her dreaming are too strong to let the praise through.

He lies flat on his back and listens to the sound of the machine that keeps her breathing. He wonders where she goes at night. He hopes it’s someplace better than this. He hopes that when she goes for good—when she doesn’t greet him in the morning with her opened eyes—he hopes _that_ place is better than this, too.

 

\--

  

Will is in Wolf Trap. It’s different, though: The trees are taller, the sky is somewhere past black. The snow that crunches beneath his bare feet is a color he’s pretty sure humans are incapable of processing.

The stag has lead him for miles and miles, and Will read once, he did—he read that the fantasies our brains work up at night last for just as long as they feel they do. Will can’t feel his feet, but he knows they’re tired.

These woods are always empty.

In daylight squirrels would scamper overhead, he’d swat at the gnats at his neck. Winston or Buster or Lady might push a wet nose to his hand. But in darkness, there aren’t even stars. It’s just them.

Things transform, the way they will: Twigs snapping beneath his feet become intricate gilded patterns and the branches that reach at him turn to banisters. The stag is shedding feathers, growing gaunt and spindled. When Will reaches for the evidence of its unveiling the soft black down turns to cold smoke between his fingers. He scrambles at the stairs, trying to gather what's quickly-fading. The black-eyed monster turns to him, clung to the stairs like a buck-horned spider. Sometimes it looks like a man, and sometimes it looks hoofed and reed-like. And sometimes it looks like this, multi-legged and lethal.

It says without word nor expression that Will must follow.

It’s Hannibal’s house, and he’s known that for a while now. The thing does not further shed itself so much as it dons an elaborate human costume. The eyes gain some likeness of life and the limbs busy themselves with a suit and tie. They turn to needles that sew him up, up, up—up to the stitch in his smile and the part in his hair.

Hannibal holds a hand out to Will, and Will takes it. You see, he always does.

But it doesn’t always burn.

Will cries out. It’s not that it’s hot—it’s that it’s freezing. He feels his veins fill blue and begs in words strung together nonsensically for relief.

Hannibal’s arms snake around him and everything begins to go numb. Somewhere he remembers Jack London, remembers frostbite warm and welcoming in words. It’s when it becomes comfortable that it becomes death. It’s the bodies like landmarks on Mount Everest. He remembers that, but that stuff is in books and black-and-white photographs. Those things aren’t here. And he’s feeling quite safe here.

Hannibal’s bed breathes till the spindling man tells it to shush. Its sheets are silk and woven sticky with wanting Will to never, ever leave again. Will lets himself be laid out like a corpse and smiles at the tickle of the webs. Hannibal cups his cheek.

“You won’t struggle,” he hushes.

Will shakes his head as much as he can. “I won’t struggle.”

Hannibal cradles Will’s face in claws and soft-fingered hands and runs his nose along jaw and neck, into the ribs that house Will’s heart:

Freezer-burnt, vacuum-packed, something Hannibal should have thrown out months ago.

Will peeks into the cavity of his chest and cries.

“I’m sorry,” he weeps, “I’m sorry. Please, maybe it’s still good, maybe you can—maybe you can do something, maybe you can—please, please don’t—”

“Shhh,” Hannibal strokes the frozen tissue and his eyes glint upwards. “I can feel it.”

Will doesn’t understand, begins to convulse.

“Shhh, _shhh,_ ” one hand clasped around the blue meat of his pulse and the other in his hair, down his cheeks, over his lips. He presses the smooth of his face to the rough of Will’s fear.

“It’s still there,” Hannibal hisses. “It’s still beating. What you do with it… that is _entirely_ up to you.”

Will is blubbering out pleas, and then he is sucking in the breath he cannot seem to get, and then he is taking Hannibal’s thumb between his teeth and biting, biting and calming and tonguing, and then sucking. Quieting and sucking and whining when it’s pulled away—calmed instantly when it’s replaced with a forefinger.

Will suckles at the digits till his breathing is even and drowsy. He feels the venom slipping down the back of his throat and only remarks absently that it is sweet and cinnamon before he drifts into consciousness.

 

\--

 

Will wakes hard up.


End file.
